Comment on WBXML Submission

The WBXML is analagous to XML in that it represents documents structured
with elements and attributes. Differences between WBXML and XML include:

Structure is denoted by binary codes rather than textual markup.

There is no representation of comments in WBXML.

Use of internal entities is constrained (see section "Document Tokenisation")

There is no representation for markup declarations; DTD information may be
included by reference.

While XML 1.0 requires a web address (URI) as the system identifier for external
DTD references, WBXML allows a public identifier alone to serve as an external
reference.

In XML, a public identifer is a string of characters. WBXML allows well-known
integers to be used as public identifier; the first 128 are "reserved for
use in future WAP specifications."

WBXML includes a number of extension mechanisms, including global extension
tokens, well known code-pages, and opaque data.

From the abstract:

The WBXML encoding format is a simple binary tokenized format. It was designed
to reduce the transmission size of XML documents, and to reduce the complexity
of client XML parser implementations.

Meanwhile, flate compression is very suitable for compressing XML grammars
such as SVG and it is already part of
HTTP 1.1. The benefits of flate compression
versus binary tokenization vary considerably with the size of the document
and the available energy, memory, and processor speed.

Next Steps

The W3C membership is invited to discuss the disposition of the submission
in the
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